Jorge Eielson #01 - prior body

Jorge Eduardo Eielson is one of Peru’s most unrecognized poets & artists, which is greatly do to the fact that he expatriated to Italy early in his life, only to return twice. The poem “prior body” comes from a short collection called “noches oscura del cuerpo” (dark night of the body), published in Rome, 1955. It’s made up of 14 short “bodies” of poetry. One point of interest, with respect to the form, is the fact that Eielson uses no commas throughout the entire collection. He regularly substitutes 3 blank spaces for commas, colons or semicolons & replaces a period by breaking a line. His modification of grammatical function is innovative & represents the subtlety of gesture in his poetics.